Jeff wrote:
> Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
> > http://symbol.pentaside.org/article/loop.html
>
> I cannot believe how seriously silly this thread is. HTML is no more
a
> programming language than a makefile is. It is a method of storing
> data. Just as a makefile is a method of storing rules.
>
> The HTML cannot produce different data than what it contains. It is
> incapable of creating data at all. It requires that a programming
> language be embedded into it (ala PHP, Javascript, etc) to do this.
With redirects + showing its log file in a frame, I suspect one can
gain the ability to perform useful computations in the sense you're
thinking of. After all, HTML does result in side-effects and has the
entire internet at its disposal.
By not classifying HTML as a programming language, I would miss the
ability to consider this possibility. We can of course argue about the
legality of using an implementation-specific thing like a log file, but
that would merely cause me to to research the HTML spec and find
something else to use, or just consider other ideas.
This is partially just amusing to me, but also there's an important
point -- us programmers have been taught to only program the tiniest
selection of machines which occur in nature. We are so
hyper-specialized that we can barely even consider interesting
non-vonNeumann architectures. Programming for most people is about
playing PEEK and POKE with RAM.
When you look at an old book like Minsky's _Computation: Finite and
Infinite Machines_, you see that they had much more interesting ideas
about computing-machines than nowadays. Compare it to Sipser's or
Hopcroft's new books, and you'll see how ossified computing is.
If your client's domain has built a language which for centuries has
gotten useful work done, and when you encode it you find out that it's
really "just" a state machine, is such a program still any less useful?
Will that justify not calling it a programming language? From that
Russell/Norvig AI book, apparently people in many fields decrease the
expressive power they use, with say linguists going down from
context-free grammars to regular expressions. Does it particularly
matter that you can factor out from their code languages which happen
to have the property that there are some finite computations they can't
do? Because more expressive power can't produce a seriously effective
procedure?
In other words, I'm applying the MacGyver standard to programming
languages. What sorts of things can he turn into effective procedures?
(Aside from that questionable time where he made a strong laser out of
a lens.)
MfG,
Tayssir
--
Bruce Lee's teachings fit in nontrivially with programming?
http://www.dreamsongs.com/cgi-bin/ExtravagariaWiki/index.cgi?NontraditionalLiterature